Ferranti-Packard 6000 - Sales

Sales

Development of the FP-6000 was completed in late 1962, and the first production machine was delivered to the Federal Reserve Bank in early 1963. The prototype machine was later greatly expanded into the largest FP-6000 installation and sold to Saskatchewan Power, the provincial electrical supply crown corporation for use in performing both engineering calculations and customer billing simultaneously. From there additional sales proved very difficult. Over the next year they sold one to the Defence Research Establishment Atlantic, in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and the other to the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). The later machine allowed the TSX to become the first computerized exchange a few years later. Sales attempts to the City of Toronto to drive the world's first computerized traffic control system failed, as did a sale to Ontario's Treasury department.

Sales by Ferranti UK were also non-existent. For years the Canadian division had to put up with not invented here problems and found their efforts continually blocked by the UK computer division's managers. It seemed that the FP-6000 was to suffer a similar fate, and the UK division had argued with the Canadian engineers about practically every part of the design. In fact the real reasons in this case would not become clear until later in the year.

Ferranti had been supporting their UK computer division for over a decade at this point, and had failed to make any significant sales. Management was tired of the drain on company resources, and decided to sell off the division entirely. They initially entered discussions with International Computers and Tabulators in early 1963, but ICT looked at the continual losses and was less than interested. Ferranti then "sweetened" the deal by showing them the FP-6000, offering to include that in the deal if ICT bought the division.

ICT was in the midst of re-designing its own series of low-end machines, and had been considering licensing an RCA IBM-compatible design. However the FP-6000 offered them a more attractive system that was deliberately not IBM-based, and could be scaled with the addition of smaller and larger machines to produce an entire line. ICT was finally interested, as one Ferranti board member put it, "without the FP-6000 we would not have gotten the deal we wanted from ICT. The FP-6000 was the golden brick in the sale of our operations.". The deal was announced in June 1963, to the surprise of the Canadian division.

The FP-6000, with the addition of the ICT Standard Interface, became the ICT 1904, and a slightly modified version would be offered as the 1905. The Canadian division offered to build both of these machines, which seemed obvious, as well as headquarter North American sales and marketing. However ICT was interested only in the European market, and declined on both offers. The entire hardware team resigned and formed an electronics company known as ESE, later purchased by Motorola. They were soon followed by the software team, who formed I. P. Sharp Associates, a major Canadian programming firm of the 1970s and 80s. The team in charge of the system's storage devices left some time later in 1967 to form Teklogix.

SaskPower ran their FP-6000 for 20 years before retiring it in 1982. The machine was donated to the Western Development Museum in 1983, and is the last remaining example.